A Few Remarks on Agency

Over at Circling Squares and Struggle Forever, Philip and Jeremy are having a nice discussion of agency. Since flat ontology is mentioned, I thought I’d pipe in with my two cents. When I use the term “flat ontology”, I don’t use it to suggest that everything has agency. I think agency is something pretty specific and isn’t common to all entities. For me, flat ontology just means that everything is material (even incorporeal entities!) and that there is nothing outside of the world that conditions or overcodes everything else such as Platonic forms, God, and so on. Flat ontology just means that there’s only the world. It’s a synonym for immanence. Why do I generally use the term “flat ontology” rather than “immanence”? Because a number of people heavily influenced by phenomenology and the mind/body dualism seem to confuse immanence with what is in the mind rather than what is in the world. For example, folks say that sensations are immanent to the mind while the object producing sensations is transcendent to the mind. This is not how I use the distinction. Immanence just means something is in the world.

On the topic of agency, I think that an entity must be minimally self-directing in order to be an agent. That said, following Daniel Dennett in Freedom Explained, I also believe there are degrees of agency. A bacteria has agency, but a very low degree of agency, because it is able to move towards and away from certain chemical gradients in a fluid or can move away from lie or darkness. A cat has more agency than a bacteria or pine tree. An adult human has more agency than a child, and so on. If a cat has agency whereas a rock does not, then this is because a rock can only move when subjected to another force, whereas in one way or another all of these entities can initiate movement on their own (I sidestep the metaphysical question of freedom here as I just don’t know how to solve it).

Here are a few additional points: First, the problem with humanist conceptions of agency is that they implicitly assume an idealized model of humans that says we’re all the same (usually that of white, middle class dudes). Following Andy Clark and Deleuze and Guattari, however, I think this is a bad assumption. A knight on horseback is a different agent, than a naked person and a person with a smart phone is a different agent than an aborigine. We need to distinguish agents by what they can do, by their powers or capacities, rather than by resemblances. I devote a lot of digital to ink to this thesis in Onto-Cartography, so I won’t rehearse it now.

Second, we need to recognize that there are agencies beyond human individuals. Here I’m not simply referring to dog, blue whales, trees, and bacteria, but also corporations, governments, revolutionary political parties, and so on. These entities– or machines as I now call them –both are self-directing in their own ways, and have forms of agency that can’t be found among the parts that compose them. A revolutionary political party is able to do things that the individual person’s that compose them cannot.

Third, with Philip, I do not accept the structure/agency couplet. I think the structure/agency couplet poorly describes how worlds are actually organized. For me there are only machines and relations/interactions between machines. What we call a “structure” is just the manner in which one machine, captures another machine in its “gravity” (a metaphor) or power (I try to abandon the term power because it’s too anthropocentric). The moon moves about the earth because the earth bends time-space in such a way that this is the only path along which the moon can move. A person that is paid by a company in “scrip” is trapped where they live because scrip can only be redeemed at the company store and cannot be exchanged for federal tender. They are caught in the “gravity” of the company and scrip. It is not that there is something called “structure” that is other than agents, but that one agent is caught in the orbit of another agent in a way that limits their movement, fixes their local manifestations, and that influences their becomings.

Finally, fourth, we should not assume that agents and subjects are the same thing. Following Michel Serres, I argue that a subject is a machine that organizes the movements, local manifestations, and becomings of other entities. Serres gives the example of the game of rugby to illustrate this point. In rugby, he claims, it is the ball, not the players that are the subject. The players are subjected to the ball. The ball brings the players together in certain relations that are constantly shifting. However, it also modifies their status throughout the course of the game. The person who has the ball is now pursued. When another person gets the ball he now either becomes a pursuer or a defender. It is the ball that “assigns” the roles and that therefore functions as subject. Clearly the ball’s status as subject is temporary. When the game is over and it’s tossed in the back of a car, it ceases to be subject. Anything can serve as a subject, even where the entity that takes on the function of subject is not an agent in the sense outlined above. Enough for now.

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17 Responses to “A Few Remarks on Agency”

agency is sometimes Englished as assemblage in the translation of the French agencement, which gives further weight – if not gravity – to the notion of machinic agency or of agency belonging to the machinic phylum

this is very interesting, following serres you reach a terminal determinism, ready to be turned into fortune telling that can only be avoided by the question of “what is the ball?”, even the nonhumans’ explanation from Latour is not enough to state that the object is a subject, in my opinion is not either a subject o an objet but a symbol and even a symbolic operation of the machinery you mention (I assume following Deleuze) That is why even thou ontology can be flattened there are so many holes in the line of reasoning

I love the idea of incorporeal entities as nonetheless “material” — the materiality of incorporeal entities, something akin to Jung’s psychic truths which is an order of validity beyond actual fact, or archetypal complexes as self-aware “personalities” with their own senses of humor, likes and dislikes etc.

I think that archetypal complexes have agency, and that the ego is but one complex among many — when I am possessed by moral outrage, for instance, it is as if something else with its own agency has taken hold of me. The idea that “I” (my ego) is the sole material agent which acts in my life is so much myth of autonomy, sovereignty, mastery and so on.

I also really like how your rejection of critique in favor of affirmation (from a previous article a couple weeks back). It seems to me that affirmation is what is needed more than ever, which take us into new and unexpected territory instead of finding in each new phenomena just one more reification of some anticipated structure.

That being said, how would you reconcile your flat ontology with something like Richard Tarnas’ archetypal cosmology? Tarnas affirms an ensouled worldview which allows for astrology to work, not via causality, but via synchronicity — meaningful coincidence, or acausal orderedness. It seems to me that you might be able to completely reject astrology as so much anthropocentric hubris, but what if the true anthropocentrism is in projecting soullessness onto the cosmos, as Tarnas puts it, or laying claim to so-called “human features” as human in the first place? In other words, while it would be possible to reject astrology with your flat ontology, couldn’t we also affirm it with the same ontology?

I understand that most people would be loathe to admit something like astrology could be more than a remnant of superstition or magical thinking from a bygone era. However, I would propose that a worldview which allows for astrology to explain a level of truth beyond the order of causality or actual fact (rather, the archetypal, mythic, mutable truths of the human condition) is far more productive than the attempt to reconcile philosophy and the natural sciences. Science is not incompatible with contemporary philosophy, indeed they both have the same anti-mythic underpinnings, the same fundamental narrative of the Myth of Progress and the rational mind as the source of meaning in a meaningless cosmos (which is itself a mythic narrative). I propose that a much more productive tack would be to attempt to reconcile philosophy with mysticism: the idea that the cosmos is full of meaning, that humans are not the sole arbiters of meaning in an otherwise meaningless world.

If we are to entertain non-human agency, we should also entertain non-human meaning, non-human teleological causes and so on. Rather than saying that humans project teleology or project meaning onto things which are arbitrary and random, wouldn’t it be more challenging — and ultimately, deflationary of our anthropocentric hubris — to re-image the cosmos as ensouled?

I’m not entirely sure what you’re saying in your post, but I don’t see how you’re arriving at the conclusion that I advocate determinism, given that I explicitly talk about the agency of entities. As for how entities might have something like free will, I can’t say. No one has given an answer to that question to date. Generally philosophers just assume freedom as a necessary condition or postulate and move on. This, for example, is how Kant resolves the problem.

desertification of a vitalist immanence – voiding…
why I went there is your jump to vitalism whereas I would stop at anorganic vitalism … in other words, Reza empties immanence of even the possibility of vitalism by voiding it of being…
no?

I’m not sure that movement towards or away exhibits ‘agency’ – rather than reaction.. a thermostats moves too… why doesn’t it have agency? The main issue is is one of causality – only beings that can initiate causal series have agency – not ones that merely react….how do you know a bacteria is ‘self-directing’….I mean it’s a pretty important claim. because it moves? No. But perhaps we have become natural scientists?

I recently finished Andy Clark’s Being There and am almost through Dennett’s Freedom Evolves. Naturally I am looking at both of them with, perhaps, a stronger realist lens, but the basic idea of both makes me think that the idea of agency is that the more a unit is able to rely on or take an interest in other units or entities or processes, the greater the degree of freedom it seems to have. When we get to human animals, our particular temporal dimension grants us incredible agency. Dennett is talking about this in Chapter 5, and I can’t help but think of Clark’s extended mind theory when he does. An entity that is more extended, that relies on more scaffolding, that has a wider temporal dimension, is able to have more afforded it than entities that are less dependent on such scaffolding or infrastructure. In a weird way, I read Dennett as saying something like: our dependence on these infrastructures and our independence as agents seem to grow in direct and not inverse proportion.

I meant to conclude with this: Dennett and Clark are interested surely in human agency, but as you and similar thinkers have shown as a whole, I think, this is agency in one narrow sense; others can and are being developed.

impressive table of contents Levi! One little thing that was pointed out to me. Agency (semovience) does not require external movement (ecphoria). Imagination is a form of ‘agency’.
‘ Ecphoria – the carrying outward of an action – is thus not essential to the inauguration of new causal series which circumstanced psyches interject in nature. I take advantage (“I avail”) of the entirety of the states of a brain (to wit, such a brain that cadacualtically has become mine, in the segment of its dynamics that attains manifestation; that is to say, in the segment of this brain’s dynamics to which my ontic makeup reacts non-indifferently to. Thus I could merely imagine moving a finger or, I could instead give shape to such imagination with the physiological dynamics of my brain’s portions that trigger (ecphorize) such a movement.” (Mariela Szirko).

I think agency can definitely be understood as gradationally distributed rather than defined in binary fashion. I also agree that it’s a matter for empirical investigation rather than just a priori pronouncement. Just who and what has agency is as much a matter for concrete investigation into things as it is reflection upon abstract conditions.